Terra Café, a student-run initiative, has been pleasing the palates of a small portion of RPI students and professors by serving up an all-inclusive meal every Wednesday. The irony of running this local and organic café, which focuses on minimizing the energy needed to source ingredients, is that people are wandering around wasting energy in an attempt to find the place. To clear things up, Terra Café occurs every Wednesday from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm on the second floor of Russell Sage Dining Hall. For only five or seven dollars, the servers will bring you a full plate that always includes fresh garden salad and delicious apple cider, and often highlights eggplant, peppers, and other seasonal vegetables from local farms. It is the only place on campus where all these ingredients come together on one plate.
Terra Café’s purpose is to find great food resources through organic and local distributors. Much of our food comes from the farmer’s market downtown. In addition to serving weekly meals, Terra Café volunteers recently joined with Sodexo Chef Jackie Baldwin to cook 30 gallons of sweet potato and corn chowder for the Chowder Fest in downtown Troy. After feeding what seemed to be all of Troy, the group was given the award of Best Vegetarian Chowder.
To continue improving their menu and their message, Terra Café members are working to utilize the RPI greenhouse on Sunset Terrace. The greenhouse, a product of Ecologic efforts several years ago, has never been used to its full potential. Jim Rourke, a new hire of Sodexo with experience in organic greenhouse gardening, will coordinate with Terra Café members and other volunteers in an effort to maximize the greenhouse space. The food will be grown without any petroleum-based fertilizers and with only minimal electric heating, so that it will produce the best, freshest, and most sustainable lettuce and herbs for the weekly Terra Café meals. It is amazing to think that our initial goal was to source food within 100 miles, and now it is possible to have salads sourced from about 100 meters away. The only thing closer would be growing the food on the table.
Sustainable eating requires more than just sourcing food. It requires an understanding of genetically modified organisms, the energy needed to grow vegetables versus raising cows or chickens, and a number of other complicated tasks. We will be holding an event in November to highlight some of these issues, so come enjoy healthy, scrumptious food, and make your search for a more sustainable lifestyle much easier.
With these efforts underway, I hope you find it worth the energy and effort to find this Wednesday’s hotspot hidden on the second floor of Russell Sage Dining Hall. We promise to make you feel at home, or at least within 100 miles of it.
